Yet There Was Something Amusing
In The Situation; There Was A Joke - That Rarest Of All Things In
Rome - Latent In It, Which One Suspected Only From The Amiable, The
All-But-Smiling Behavior Of The Strikers.
There was not the slightest
disorder during the two days that the strike lasted.
When it was called
off at a meeting of the unions on Saturday night, one of the seven
Sundays of the Roman week dawned upon an activity at the neighboring
cab-stand no peacefuller and not much gayer than the silence and
solitude of the mornings previous. As for the general effect in the
city, you would hardly have known that particular Sunday from those
which had gone by the names of Friday and Saturday. Throughout Italy
there is now a Sunday-closing law whose effect in a land once of joyous
Sabbaths strikes some such chill to the heart as pierces it in Boston on
that day, or in the farther eastern or western avenues of New York, when
the Family Entrances are religiously locked.
The Italian state has, in fact, so far taken the matter in charge as to
have established a secular holiday, coming once a week, which has almost
disestablished the holidays of the Church, formerly of much more
frequent occurrence. This secular holiday, which every workman has a
right to, he may neither give nor sell to his master. He may not even
loaf it away in the place where he works, lest he should be
clandestinely employed. He must go out of the shop or house or factory
or foundry, and spend his ten hours where he cannot be suspected of
employing them in productive industry for hire. This law has been
enacted in accordance with the will of the unions and no doubt in
correction of great abuses. Neither masters nor men now recognize the
old-fashioned _festa_ as they once did. Whether the men like the new
holiday so well, I did not get any of them explicitly to say. Of course,
they cannot all take it at once; they must take it turn about, and they
may not find their enforced leisure so lively as the old voluntary
saints' days, when their comrades were resting, too. As for the masters,
one of the employers of labor, whom I found filling his man's place,
would merely say: "It is the new law. No doubt we shall adjust ourselves
to it." He did not complain.
X
SEEING ROME AS ROMANS SEE US
Shortly after our settlement in the Eternal City, which has so much more
time to be seen than the so-journer has to see it, I pleased myself with
the notion of surprising it by visiting in a studied succession the many
different piazzas. This, I thought, would acquaint me with the different
churches, and on the way to them I should make friends with the various
quarters. Everything, old or new, would have the charm of the
unexpected; no lurking ruin would escape me; no monument, whether column
or obelisk, statue, "storied urn or animated bust" or mere tablet, would
be safe from my indirect research. Before I knew it, I should know Rome
by heart, and this would be something to boast of long after I had
forgotten it.
I could not say what suggested so admirable a notion, but it may have
been coining by chance one day on the statue of Giordano Bruno, and
realizing that it stood in the Campo di Fieri, on the spot where he was
burned three hundred years ago for abetting Copernicus in his
sacrilegious system of astronomy, and for divers other heresies, as well
as the violation of his monastic vows. I saw it with the thrill which
the solemn figure, heavily draped, deeply hooded, must impart as mere
mystery, and I made haste to come again in the knowledge of what it was
that had moved me so. Naturally I was not moved in the same measure a
second time. It was not that the environment was, to my mind, unworthy
the martyr, though I found the market at the foot of the statue given
over, not to flowers, as the name of the place might imply, but to such
homely fruits of the earth as potatoes, carrots, cabbages, and, above
all, onions. There was a placidity in the simple scene that pleased me:
I liked the quiet gossiping of the old market-women over their baskets
of vegetables; the confidential fashion in which a gentle crone came to
my elbow and begged of me in undertone, as if she meant the matter to go
no further, was even nattering. But the solemnity of the face that
looked down on the scene was spoiled by the ribbon drawn across it to
fasten a wreath on the head, in the effort of some mistaken zealot of
free thought to enhance its majesty by decoration. It was the moment
when the society calling itself by Giordano Bruno's name was making an
effort for the suppression of ecclesiastical instruction in the public
schools; and on the anniversary of his martyrdom his effigy had suffered
this unmeant hurt. In all the churches there had been printed appeals to
parents against the agnostic attack on the altar and the home, and there
had been some of the open tumults which seem in Rome to express every
social emotion. But the clericals had triumphed, and an observer more
anxious than I to give a mystical meaning to accident might have
interpreted the disfiguring ribbon over Bruno's bronze lips as a new
silencing of the heretic.
I certainly did not construe it so, and, if my notion of serially
visiting the piazzas of Rome was not prompted by my chance glimpse of
the Campo di Fiori, it was certainly not relinquished because of any
mischance in my meditated vision of it. I had merely reflected that I
could not hope to carry out my scheme without greater expense both in
time and money than I could well afford, for, though cabs in Rome are
swift and cheap, yet the piazzas are many and widely distributed; and I
finally decided to indulge myself in a novelty of adventure verging
close upon originality.
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